Hope Fills the 7 Train for Mets Fans. The Next Stop: Reality.

I fielded the phone call in late afternoon: The Mets are in first place, the world champion San Francisco Giants are in town, and we have our blond Viking strikeout machine, Noah Syndergaard, on the mound.

Be there, aloha.

Soon enough I was swinging off the No. 7 subway to join my sons, Aidan and Nick, at Citi Field, where the temperature danced in the 70s and the field was a radiant green.

Alas, Thor — as Syndergaard is nicknamed — lasted six ragged innings, bested by Chris Heston, a slow-throwing Loki the Trickster of a pitcher. He tossed a no-hitter against the Mets’ hapless collection of batters. We tried the next night, too, watching the Mets’ Dark Knight take on the Giants. For five innings, Matt Harvey appeared to be in fierce form.

Then the Giants’ hitters drew a bead on his 98-mile-per-hour fastballs, and Batman ran for cover.

The Mets tossed down an 11-game winning streak in April, giving all concerned a contention hallucination. That streak aside, the Mets have gone a less-than-illustrious 21-29.

To be a Mets fan is to exist in tension between hope and the muscle memory of much disappointment. Even in the wake of a sweet win on Thursday to salvage the last of three games with the Giants, questions arise about our Mets.

This team is decidedly more talented than in past years, and more resilient. Injuries, however, have cast a long shadow across the best player, David Wright; a fine young pitcher, Zack Wheeler; and the starting catcher, Travis d’Arnaud, to name just three of too many. You can add the closer, Jenrry Mejia, who decided to go retro and sample an old-fashioned steroid and earned a half-season suspension.

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Matt Harvey gave up three home runs, and seven runs, in his six innings against the Giants on Wednesday.CreditMike Stobe/Getty Images

The Mets’ remaining young pitchers are hard-throwing horses. But ESPN documentary hype to the side, we may have grown too sanguine about Harvey’s return from elbow surgery. He cleared a great hurdle when he marched out to the mound in spring training and threw hard.

As Hardball Times pointed out in March, replacement of the elbow tendon is a very serious operation. An awful lot of pitchers, even talented, willful sorts, struggle mightily to return to form.

Stephen Strasburg has hacked about for the Washington Nationals, and now Harvey is frowning at pitches that will not go where he insists they go.

These young men lost a year of honing their craft. Now they try to discover what their arms can do. Can they still make a fastball hop, a curveball dive?

The anxiety distracts from the daily classroom that is the life of a young pitcher.

On Wednesday, Harvey appeared to muscle his pitches rather than pitch. He would throw 97, then nod at his catcher, rear, and zip the next one at 98 m.p.h.

Here’s the problem: If a major league hitter knows that 98 m.p.h. is coming, he’ll eventually slap it silly. That is what Giants catcher Buster Posey did when Harvey tried to sneak a two-strike fastball by. Whap. It landed at the end of a rope in right field, and a run scored.

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Michael Cuddyer, center, hit a winning single in the ninth for the Mets to score Curtis Granderson on Thursday against the Giants.CreditAl Bello/Getty Images

Syndergaard had absorbed his remedial lesson a night earlier. He threw BBs, cracking triple figures on the radar gun. “I felt I had some of the best stuff I’ve had in my entire life,” he told reporters.

Velocity isn’t pitching; he gave up 10 hits. None of this should prompt fans to rend their Mets jerseys. If he follows a normal pitching developmental arc and can avoid that damnable Tommy John surgery, Syndergaard could be a very fine pitcher in a year.

Which leads me to an ancillary thought: The Mets’ general manager, Sandy Alderson, has a book declaring him a baseball genius, not to mention the man who revived the Mets, all without any of his Mets teams finishing with even a .500 record. He has made astute trades, particularly in picking up d’Arnaud and Syndergaard, and restocked the franchise’s minor league teams with talent.

Who am I to question him?

Except his organization remains painfully short of men who can productively swing a bat, or even bunt and run, as the Giants did so well. You wonder about his roster management. On Wednesday night, Eric Campbell, who is filling in gamely at third base, suffered a whiplash blow to his neck and head. (Oddly, the Mets decided not to test him for a concussion.)

He fell to the turf. This was dreadful and scary for the team — the Mets did not have a single spare infielder on their major league roster that night. (They have veteran infielders at their Las Vegas affiliate; perhaps the Mets find themselves running short on frequent-flier miles?)

Noah Syndergaard allowed 10 hits to go with four runs in six innings against the Giants on Tuesday.CreditFrank Franklin Ii/Associated Press

That was the sound of a manager left strategically stripped naked by his general manager.

Defense remains a puzzlement. A young pitcher’s psyche is a fragile vessel, and the failure to record easy outs can crack it in two. In Juan Lagares, the fleet and artful center fielder, the Mets appear to have found their man. But their corner outfielders have reached their mid-30s, which is to describe AARP status in baseball terms.

The infield defense is a nightly wince. Wilmer Flores has a sweet swing. But the hole between third base and shortstop remains the abyss.

At third base, Campbell plays so far back that a double-play grounder is more theory than reality.

A dive into the metrics chest yields the discovery that second baseman Ruben Tejada has the range of a Central Park statue. He tends to set up on the lip of the outfield. Against the Giants, he faced a two-minute run to pick up a slow-rolling grounder.

Syndergaard yielded three infield hits, at least two of which could have been outs, and his fielders failed to turn double plays. To his credit, the young pitcher did not file suit in a Queens court charging lack of support.

It would be a shame to see a promising season circle the drain. The return of long-injured players could help. Playing in a lackluster division helps, too.

Mets fans are not so easily convinced. Attendance serves as a canary in the mine. The first night, the Mets filled barely half the stadium, and seemingly a fifth of the fans were orange-hued Giants supporters. The next night, even with Dark Knight hoopla, the Mets drew fewer than 25,000.

Hope is fine, but hype will not sustain.

Email: powellm@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hope Fills the 7 Train. The Next Stop: Reality.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe